Here, I share my thoughts and insights on Emerging Leadership, agile, organizational management, and more. As a passionate advocate for effective and efficient leadership, I believe continuous learning and improvement are crucial to success in any organization. Through this blog, I aim to provide valuable resources, tools, and strategies for emerging leaders to help them navigate the complexities of the modern workplace. Join me on this journey of growth and discovery as we explore the ever-evolving landscape of leadership and management together.
The Origins of the BEPS Framework
Navigating the bustling corridors of a 300-strong cloud infrastructure team, I witnessed firsthand the complexities and challenges of a large-scale software development setup. The traditional organization with its neatly partitioned functions – product management, software engineering, quality assurance, and the like – seemed efficient on paper, but it was far from optimal. We brought together…
The Myth of “Startup Culture”
The term “startup culture” is often thrown around in the business world, conjuring images of casual dress codes, open office spaces, and a relentless drive for innovation. However, after delving into the operations of various startups, like Freetrade, it becomes evident that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all “startup culture.” Instead, the culture of a startup is…
The Future of Consulting: How Clarasys is Redefining the Game
In the ever-evolving business world, it’s not uncommon to come across companies claiming to be ‘innovative’ or ‘disruptive.’ However, occasionally, you stumble upon a gem that embodies these terms. One such company is Clarasys, a consulting firm that has taken a bold leap from its traditional roots to become a beacon of innovation. The Journey…
Read the post! The Future of Consulting: How Clarasys is Redefining the Game
How to Win Friends and Influence People
We all know the importance of building strong relationships and effective communication skills. Do we? One of the best resources to learn these skills is Dale Carnegie’s classic book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Originally published in 1936, this book has remained popular for decades because the principles it outlines are timeless and…
This is Season Three of Le Podcast!
Season 3 of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership features interviews with experts on leadership and related topics. In the first episode, Jared Kleinert, the CEO, and co-founder of Offsite and the founder of Meeting of the Minds, discusses the importance of meeting in person in the future of work, the process and considerations for organizing…
How to change
I spoke at Lean Kanban France, the ancestor of Flowcon, ten years ago. A big thank you to the organizers who invited me to speak again at the celebratory edition. I first said no to avoid another travel, and then finally accepted as I was pitching for Red Hat at a public sector event in…
The Coaching Habit
The Coaching Habit is a book by Michael Bungay Stanier (aka MBS). In telling you about the book, I feel I am giving away many of my secrets. But, yeap, they are not mine. The subtitle is: “Say Less, Ask More and Change the Way You Lead Forever.” It is just perfectly telling everything. The…
The 67 days of the leadership challenge
The compilation of all the LinkedIn posts published over the summer of 2022 with the hashtag #67daysofleadership.
Peer-to-Peer Feedback Survey
During my #67daysofleadership challenge, on Day 47, I shared about Three Trillion Dollar Coach. I mentioned that I want to use with my team a peer-to-peer feedback survey inspired by one used at Google and described in the book. To give some context, my team is the one leading all engineering at Red Hat. 🤔…
A New Habit for the New Year
Changing Your Team From The Inside chapters end with an activity for the readers to try. The exercise suggested at the end of the first chapter, titled Be The Change, is the Best Possible Self. When you follow the last link, you can learn how to do the activity and why you should absolutely try…
A tale of a leadership team workshop
Day One: Coming Together For some leaders from different organizations that will merge into one in the upcoming weeks, the face-to-face meeting is the first opportunity to meet in person with each other and their new manager. Even if the three facilitators made sure to greet everyone as they entered the room, the tension was…
Invest a few hours to excel at public speaking
A few months back, I was doing some research on public speaking, and I stumbled on this short video of one of the world’s experts in public speaking Conor Neil. What I learned in the video changed forever the way I envision starting and finishing a talk. Yes, there is a grownup way to say: Once upon…
Read the post! Invest a few hours to excel at public speaking
Emile wants to solve consistency the open source way
Do you remember Igraine from the Primary Team story? Igraine leads the EMEA region of a global company. Bob, Igraine’s manager, told the Field Leadership Team that he wanted to get more consistency from the three main regions and that Igraine, leading EMEA, Yun, leading APAC, and Aileen, leading Americas, should come up with proposals.…
Read the post! Emile wants to solve consistency the open source way
Start with Music
A few weeks back, I joined yet another online meeting, and something felt instantly different. Smooth music was playing in the background while the host welcomed me to the meeting. The host was Michael Doyle, and that was the first time I was exposed to that approach of welcoming people in online meetings. I tried…
Are you at the right table?
In Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Tony Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos, shared how he learned to play poker out of boredom. Poker is not like the other gambling games played in casinos with odds stacked against you. With Poker, you don’t play against the casino. You play against the…
Hand Signals for Virtual Meeting
One person asks a question, not even a rhetorical one, followed by an awkward silence.
Primary Team
In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni tells the story of an executive team. To avoid having the functional leaders be only interested in their own department, the CEO asks them to consider the Leadership Team as their primary team. The idea of a primary team that takes precedence over all the others…
Resolution for the Exhausted
What seemed to be a long time ago, I started my first post of the year by telling you that I opened a Gym Club in January and told you what happened to that club in February. More important, you will find in the post mentioned above suggestion to keep up with your resolutions. The…
What a Coding Dojo taught me about agile
In their article, What is agile?, Jen Krieger, Daniel Oh, and Matt Takane discuss what we at Red Hat consider the most important sentence of the Agile Manifesto: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.” I like this sentence because it helps to understand why we could apply…
Another book discussion club
I believe I already told you a lot about the benefit of participating or facilitating a book discussion club. Last week, I received in a tweet another proof of that. I was amazed by the quality of the visualization the people from the book discussion club at Conserto came up with. Sebastien tweeted the visualization…
Chief of Staff Academy
A few weeks back, I attended McChrystal Group Chief of Staff Virtual Academy. I was looking to stretch my thinking to further grow in the role. Since then, I keep a copy of the Chief of Staff four quadrants on my desk to remind me where the focus should be depending on the topic, and…
Three Questions to Replace You
What are the three questions you would ask a potential Chief of Staff that would replace you?
Crossed-interviews with Appreciative Inquiry
In a previous post, I described a great approach to get people to get to know each other a little bit more thanks to a fantastic one-on-one format. Try it, you will see yourself, it is really fantastic! Another approach to get people to know each other is to use Appreciative Inquiry. I used nearly…
It is not Customer-First, it is Customer-Centered
Who wouldn’t dream of being in a People First company? A lot made it a philosophy like Vineet Nayar, the celebrated CEO of HCL Technologies, recounting in his book Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down. Being a People-First company is adopting the posture of a servant leader, as described by Robert K.…
Read the post! It is not Customer-First, it is Customer-Centered
The 10 rules of Alan Mulally
American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company by Bryce G. Hoffman is an amazing book. The New York Times said about it: A compelling narrative that reads more like a thriller than a business book. I could not have said it better! I posted a while back a quote from…
The 4 BEPS Axes of a Leader
The 4 axes of a leader emerged from conversations in which I was trying to explain what a manager is not expected to do. The attempts to tell people that they should not split the work items, or distribute the work between the team members were leading to a lot of incomprehension. With the help…
Celebrating the First Season!
Yay! The first season of Le Podcast comes to an end! It is time to celebrate and thank the guests and the listeners! Season One is composed of 15 episodes covering leadership and team building. The top 3 (in terms of audience, I love them all equally 🙂 ) is: Do you want 10x Engineers?…
The Motive
Why so many leaders abdicate their most important responsibilities? The sentence above is the subtitle of The Motive, a book by Patrick Lencioni, the famous author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Advantage. The first part of the book is a business fable. If you read I am a Software Engineer and…
The Culture Map
The Culture Map is an excellent book by Erin Meyer. As my current team evolves in an international context, I had the idea to use the culture map as an icebreaker to start one of our quarterly meetings. The team is composed of people from France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and The Netherlands. The team has…
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful is a book by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter published in 2007. The trouble with successful people is that they tend to believe that their “bad” habits are not so “bad.” They have proof of that. They are successful. So,…
April’s Fool
Michael Doyle and I are launching a new book in May 2020. The book is I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge: The book that helps increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Some people told us that it was not the perfect timing as people surely have other things on their…
Chief of Staff in the Tech Industry
In this article, I would like to provide information and pointers to information on the Chief of Staff’s role in the tech industry. As a member of the Engineering Leadership Team at Red Hat, I have been in that kind of role for almost three years for the SVP of Engineering. People instantly connect the…
A very special dinner
In May 2011, Isabel and I had the pleasure of organizing the first edition of TEDxBordeaux. The theme we chose was Together. The underlying idea was, as I said in my introduction to the event, We can rediscover our power to change things. Together. When I read about 15 Toasts in Priya Parker’s book, The…
The Art of Gathering
I have been asked thousands of times to facilitate small or large gatherings. When I worked on Changing Your Team From The Inside, I wanted to make clear that self-organization is the most powerful way for people to organize, but that based on their history, you will need to help them get there. You will…
Time matter for a team
The fact that time matter for a team is not a controversial matter. I think we would all agree on that. The other aspect of time that we will all agree quickly on is that, not all time will matter the same way. We will not value an hour stuck in a traffic jam the…
How do we Communicate?
How do we communicate is a really important question to ask when the team is up to define its Team Agreements. Valve, the game company published its Handbook for New Employees in 2012. The subtitle provides information on how their approach to communication will have to be different: A fearless adventure in knowing what to…
Team Awards Retrospective
Everything is awesome, everything is cool when you are part of a team!The LEGO Movie Even if a lot of people would genuinely like to think that way, not everything is awesome when you are part of a team. The great thing about this is that it leaves room for improvements which a regular retrospective…
Talking to Strangers
Based on a recent recommendation, I read Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. The book was already on my reading list, as I really enjoyed his previous books. In reality, I listened to the enhanced audiobook on audible. Enhanced means that you have real interviews, and others played dialogues along with the narration by the…
Understanding A3 Thinking
Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota’s PDCA Management System is a book by Durward Sobek and Art Smalley enabling you to understand A3 thinking. The A3 report is a key tool used by Toyota in support of problem resolution. The approach enable them to solve the root causes of the problem and not…
Willpower is a “melting” currency
This is that time of the year when we think it is a good idea to take “good resolution.” Last year, I already discussed in the article How to keep up with your 2019 resolutions, how the willpower effect will come into play when we say we will do something, and we are not. Blaming ourselves…
Keynoting with my wife
I had the great pleasure of giving four keynote speeches this fall. I already told you about the keynote I gave in Bordeaux for AgileTour in this post. The three others are really special to me. We did those addresses with my wife. Comment ça? Certaines de nos croyances peuvent brider notre potentiel? #ATTls19 @isabelmonville…
Sketchnoting Resources
One of my colleagues noticed that I take all my notes graphically and asked me for resources on how to start. I am far from being an expert, and I am not doing as beautiful drawings as the experts will do, even if I am taking notes this way for more than ten years. Having…
Maybe we can love division after all
One year and a half ago, I noticed that my daughter was using an app to improve her Spanish and her English. Of course, there is an app for that! There are even several apps! The one she was using is Duolingo. I decided to give it a try and started learning Spanish from scratch.…
Keynote AgileTour Bordeaux
On October 30, 2019, I add the pleasure to deliver the keynote for AgileTour Bordeaux. I delivered the keynote titled: What is your real power? in french. The recording and the slides are already available. #atbdx C'est @alexismonville qui relance l'après-midi par une keynote pic.twitter.com/k9JsQESiMX— Chris DENIAUD (@ChrisDENIAUD) October 30, 2019 I also facilitated the…
Adding another dimension to the project management triangle
The project management triangle is a well-known model showing that the quality of the delivery is constrained by the budget, the deadlines, and the scope. The idea is that it is possible to trade between constraints: ask for an earlier delivery with a smaller scope, for example. And If you don’t trade, then the quality…
Read the post! Adding another dimension to the project management triangle
I am not your guru!
In the documentary, I Am Not Your Guru, released in 2016, Performance coach Tony Robbins proposes an interesting exercise. Imagine your life in the near future. If everything goes well in three years, how much will you make a year? Don’t read further until you have the figures. When you get the amount, multiply it…
Closing Keynote at VoxxedDays Singapore
The recording of the closing keynote I delivered at VoxxedDays Singapore is published! Let me know what you think! I would be happy to deliver an improved version of this talk for you event 🙂
The Podcast Experiment
I tried a new experiment last month! I recorded a few podcast episodes: The first one answers one important question: “How to form a team?” I recorded it with Valentin Yonchev and Matt Takane from the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs. The second one is a celebration of the availability of Changing Your Team From…
The Audiobook is available!
In addition to electronic, paperback, hardcover, and team edition, Changing Your Team From The Inside is now available as an audiobook! Michael Ried did an excellent job in narrating the book. I was even caught listening to him forgetting that I was on a review mission 🙂 The book is available on the platform you…
The Breakfast Huddle on Innovation Fatigue
While I was travelling to Singapore, I have been invited to discuss innovation with Eliott Danker on MoneyFM. Thanks to Eliott interviewing talent, we touched on a lot of different aspects: Innovation fatigue Sustainability Burnout Innovation and customer experience Team organization preventing people to innovate Inclusivity of different perspectives Management of talented individual Manager role…
Theory X and Theory Y
I had the great pleasure to deliver the closing keynote of Voxxed Days Singapore. During the talk, Going Open, I introduced Douglas McGregor theories on human motivation and management that he developed at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1957. The assumption in Theory X is that workers are lazy; they dislike and don’t…
Going Open – Closing Keynote
On May 31, 2019, I had the pleasure to deliver the closing keynote of Voxxed Days Singapore: Going Open! Thank you to all the participants and organizers for a fantastic event! I had the opportunity to sign my book, Changing Your Team From The Inside on the Red Hat booth, and to meet great people!…
Ratings and Reviews
Ratings and reviews contribute significantly to the success of a book — not a rocket science fact. When we go to platforms like Goodreads, we choose our next book based on the category, the title, the cover, the abstract, AND the ratings and reviews! It seems that ratings and reviews account for a lot in…
Agile Games New England 2019
In two previous posts, OKRs! OK What?, and The worst presentation ever, I covered sessions proposed during the Open Space on the third day of Agile Games 2019. In this post, I would like to highlight the other sessions in which I found interesting “nuggets”, to use a term that my friend and colleague, Matt…
OKRs! OK What?
OKRs! OK, What? Joseph Contreras, Scrum Master at Fidelity, proposed this Open Space session on the third day of Agile Games 2019. Joseph invited the participants to contribute to a short presentation of what Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are. In a nutshell, Objectives are where we want to go, and Key Results tell us…
The worst presentation ever
Last week, I attended Agile Games New England. The last day of the conference uses Open Space Technology which is the best way to organize and run a conference. With an Open Space, all attendees are active participants. They define the program and choose which sessions to contribute. They also have the freedom to leave…
Version 2 of the book is available
It took a few month to get to the second version of the book, Changing Your Team From The Inside. The paperback version is available on Lulu and the electronic version is on Leanpub. The new version of the book will be available on Amazon in a few days, keep in mind that Amazon takes…
Team Agreements
In the book, Changing Your Team From The Inside, I touched several times the notion of Team Agreements. Team Agreements are critical to the success of a team. By writing your team agreements, you define your standard. You set the baseline that you will improve in the future. In the team agreements, you answer the…
Can we be offended by change?
I woke up one morning, and there was a heated conversation on my favorite mailing-list. Someone had made a point that for the annual donation, and among other possible charities, we should pick Sandy Hook Promise. Sandy Hook Promise (SHP) trains students and adults to know the signs of gun violence. SHP develops and delivers…
A live coaching session with John Poelstra and Michael Doyle
A few months back, I was on The John Poelstra Show to discuss my book Changing Your Team From The Inside. A few weeks back, I also advertised how John Poelstra and Michael Doyle, discussed Ego is the Enemy during one of the episodes of the show. I love working with John and Michael. They…
Read the post! A live coaching session with John Poelstra and Michael Doyle
I still have feedback
I continued to think about feedback and had multiple discussions triggered by the article from the Harvard Business Review: The Feedback Fallacy and my post about it. Thank you, for all those discussions, they are precious. In addition to last week post that you can find below, I would like to add that, yes you…
I have some feedback
The fifth chapter of Changing Your Team From The Inside is titled: Care Personally. Why that? Because, at the time I was reviewing the book to prepare its first publication, I read Radical Candor a book by Kim Scott. I changed the quote starting the chapter with this one from Kim Scott: “The meaning of…
What Spectre and Meltdown teach us about change.
Spectre and Meltdown are among the famous microprocessors vulnerabilities. Researchers spend their days to find those vulnerabilities in the very complex systems we build. The day before the micro-architecture workshop related by Hugh Brock in this post, he organized a lunch and learn with the speakers Daniel Gruss and Daniel Genkin, who are among the…
Read the post! What Spectre and Meltdown teach us about change.
How to keep up with your 2019 resolutions!
Last year, I opened a brand new gym club on January 2nd! That was an immediate success with thousands of people showing up every day! At the beginning of February, I remodeled the place into a cocktail bar to satisfy the needs of my customers… Yes, it is a joke. But, what makes keeping up…
Happy holidays
I guess that a lot of you are getting ready for the upcoming holidays. I wish you will have some good time with your families and friends. Six months after the first publication of Changing Your Team From The Inside, I counted the published versions. There are 14 versions of the book published so far.…
Discovery One on One
I chose to end all the chapters of my book, Changing Your Team From The Inside, with a section titled “Summary and Action”. The goal of those sections is to give you keys to act immediately on your environment. I regularly received feedback about how great it was to have exercises to practice directly and…
Time flies and I wanted to tell you a few things about success
One of the last chapters of Changing Your Team From The Inside is about success. Specifically about measuring success. In that chapter, I relate how a team started to adopt OKRs. While I was reviewing that chapter, John Doerr published Measure What Matters, and I rushed to read the book as I wanted to check…
Read the post! Time flies and I wanted to tell you a few things about success
Could your team be managing itself?
“Self-organization” and “management” aren’t mutually exclusive. But we’ll need to rethink the role of the manager if we’re planning to build adaptable teams.
The top requirement for high-impact teams
Performance depends on making sure everyone knows what needs to be done.
Product Management and Engineering Collaboration
The Boston Product Management Association hosted a meetup at HubSpot yesterday about the collaboration between Product Management and Engineering. Chatting with a few people before the start of the event, it sounded like there was a need for a productive tension between the two roles. Here are a few notes from the discussion about that…
Read the post! Product Management and Engineering Collaboration
Collaboration Superpowers Podcast
I enjoyed the interview with Lisette Sutherland for the Collaboration Superpowers Podcast. The focus of Lisette is on collaboration between people working remotely. She has a ton of ideas on how to make remote work successful. Lisette is the author of a great book: Work Together Anywhere: A Handbook on Working Remotely—Successfully—for Individuals, Teams, and…
The Matrix of Principles
The Matrix of Principles is a reflection tool to capture how stakeholders understand Deming’s 14 Management Principles. Reflecting on the management principles enables the team to share their beliefs on management, to share their views on where the organization is, and to identify areas for improvement. Follow the few steps below Take a blank sheet…
On The John Poelstra Show!
I was on The John Poelstra Show last week, and as John said: It was a great conversation. John is energetic and supportive, and I enjoyed the way he guided the conversation. One part, I really enjoyed, was the transition he made between his question about waterfall project management and the reference to the book…
Back to School
For a lot of people, September means that we are back to school! Or maybe that we are not in school anymore, and so we need to take care of our learning path. I learned a lot from your feedback on Changing Your Team From The Inside. Keep that coming! It is very useful! I…
Project Aristotle – A Conversation Starter
In Measure What Matters, John Doerr speaks about the quality prized by Andy Grove: collective accountability, fearless risktaking, measurable achievements. John explains that Google studied 180 teams using five questions. The internal project code name was Project Aristotle. The results? Standout performances correlated with affirmative answers to these questions: Structure and clarity: Are goals, roles…
What a Month!
Last month on July 1st, and thanks to your support, I published Changing Your Team From The Inside. It has been a great month! (If a friend sent you this message, you could subscribe to the mailing-list following the link). I learned some of you organized several book discussion clubs. It is fantastic to see…
On Consultants
The MIT Sloan School of Management recently published a talk that Steve Jobs delivered at MIT in 1992. During the speech, he discussed how consultants, are missing a big part of learning that you can only get when you own “something over an extended period of time.” As a consultant, you will drop by, make…
November in France!
Thanks to Aurélien Morvant (Kokan) I will be back in France for two weeks at the end of November. I will present a session around the book Changing Your Team From The Inside during AgileTour Rennes (November 23-24, 2018). I already planned a few other visits to companies and organization to present the book, but…
The Story Behind The Book
Earlier this week, I announced the availability of the first edition of Changing Your Team From The Inside. I said in that post that I would tell you the story behind the book. Back in 2013, I started to think about writing a book about the connection between agile and open source values, principles, practices,…
The First Edition Is Available
The first edition of Changing Your Team From The Inside is available! Check-out which version is the right one for you! Thank you very much for your support along the way. What I feel today is quite complex. At the same time, I am happy with a sense of accomplishment, AND, I am worried that…
Great! You asked for more “versions” than expected!
Thank you to the subscribers to the mailing-list! I appreciate your support! All the subscribers to the mailing list, before the launch, will receive a 25 % discount on all versions of the book. So please, continue to share with your friends and colleagues! I am making good progress in finishing the book. The reviewers…
Read the post! Great! You asked for more “versions” than expected!
Mailing List Subscribers to receive a 25 % discount on all versions of the book!
First of all, I would like to thank the subscriber to the mailing-list! I really appreciate your support! I am happy to announce that all the subscribers to the mailing list, before the launch, will receive a 25 % discount on all versions of the book. I know that this offer leads to two questions.…
Read the post! Mailing List Subscribers to receive a 25 % discount on all versions of the book!
Kanjis at Agile Games France
The 2018 edition of Agile Games France just ended a few days ago. What is extraordinary about this unconference? The non-organization principle is pushed to the extreme, and reminded from the start to the participants: “If you want something to happen, do it” as it’s originator, Alexandre Boutin, repeats each year during the less than…
Changing Your Team From The Inside @DevConf.CZ
I gave a talk today at DevConf in Brno about Changing Your Team From The Inside. The recording is below, and you can follow that link to the slides. Thank you for all the great feedback.
Read the post! Changing Your Team From The Inside @DevConf.CZ
Care Personally
Care personally and challenge directly. That is how Kim Scott defines Radical Candor. At the end of November, I decided that I will offer her book to some of my colleagues. A book is an opportunity for learning through discussions with others. I already discussed the advantage of a book discussion club, and by offering…
Let’s get 2018 started!
Maybe you are part of the people I know and we did not hear from each other for quite some time? As it is the beginning of the new year, it is also an excellent moment to take the resolution to let my connector-self express itself more freely. To be able to connect you with…
Profile
Thanks to the Red Hat’s Women Leadership Community, the organizers, and Dana Lane, the photographer, I updated my profile picture today. The session was a lot of fun! Thank you!
The Great Dinner Party
You are hosting a dinner party in 8 weeks from now, and you wonder how to make it a great dinner party for you and your guests. First, what is the meaning of “great” for you in that context? If the party is a success what will happen? The answer could be: the guests will…
Trust Factor
Trust, as a foundation for efficient and sustainable teams, is a recurring topic on that blog. In Beyond Measure, I covered the simple exercise proposed by Margaret Heffernan to initiate a relationship between team members. I tried to nudge you to try The Evolution of Trust from Nicky Case. And, of course, I regularly referenced…
How well managed is your company?
The median answer to that question is 7 in the World Management Survey. The results on that particular item demonstrate how false perceptions come into play when we are evaluating our own company and our abilities. As discussed in the article, Why do we undervalue competent management, false perceptions undermines our ability to evaluate how…
How do I know my opinion is right?
In a meritocracy, the best idea wins. So, how can we design an organization that will enable that? Ray Dalio propose to use radical transparency, radical truthfulness, and algorithmic decision-making to create the conditions where people can speak up and say what they really think. He shares an example of feedback email he receives after…
Grow your questioning skills
We tend to want to solve the problems, even when we know that it is much better to help people to find their own solutions. I received several questions about the need to listen, and the need to ask better questions. Looking for a simple way to explain how it works, I used the GROW…
Learning from the neuroscience of trust
Trust is the foundation of the human relationship and the foundation of an effective team. I recently shared how our behavior will create or destroy trust in the article The Evolution of Trust, and more about trust as the foundation of a team in the article The Five Dysfunction of a Team. Paul J. Zak,…
Hierarchy and Decision Making
Erin Meyer covers how cultural differences in leadership styles create unexpected misunderstandings [Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston, and Beijing of the last issue of Harvard Business Review]. Looking at how people behave towards hierarchy is not enough to understand what kind of leadership style they will expect. A second dimension needs to be taken…
The Advantage of a book discussion club
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business is a book by Patrick Lencioni. This one is not a business novel, like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (you may have read that previous post). The book purpose is to explain a model to bring organizational health. I will not enter into the…
Organization Maturity Model
The publication of the Open Organization Maturity Model reminded me that we had the goal to use a similar approach. Why do we want to use a maturity model? A maturity model is, as said on Wikipedia, “a measurement of the ability of an organization for continuous improvement in a particular discipline”. So, our goal…
The Evolution of Trust
When forming a team, or starting to work with a team, I usually start with the foundation of a team: Trust. I even used several times, the book from Patrick Lencioni: The Five Dysfunction of a Team, obviously because the “Absence of Trust” is the base of the pyramid. I remember playing 2 times, with…
Managing Time
When I searched for “time management” on google this morning, there were 238,000,000 results. So, we could consider that it’s not necessarily useful to add one more. A quick look at the first page of results, and we can already see divergent opinions. From the rigid daily structure to the statement that time management is…
Team Identity
The sense of belonging is an important experience to have. Belonging means that we are accepted as part of, as a member of the group, the team, the company. We want to be part of a team because what defines the team identity is appealing to us. The team is defined by its vision and…
Town Hall Meeting
The term Town Hall Meeting is often used inside a company to characterize a meeting organized by a highly ranked executive and gathering a large part of the company employees, or even all of them. Usually, the meeting is meant to give a short status on what the executives are working on for the future…